Judge Library By Its Cover
Spokane-area building has won a top Design of Excellence award from the American Institute of Architects and National Concrete Masonry Association.
The best of show commercial building winner was chosen from among 75 entries worldwide for projects completed since 1997.
Can you guess which building is being honored?
It’s the library at Airway Heights.
That is a pretty lofty award for a 4,200-square-foot building, constructed in 1997 on a budget of just $470,000.
“It’s a little building — that’s what makes it special,” said architect Mark A. Dailey of Integrus Architecture in Spokane. He will go to an AIA gathering in Philadelphia in a few weeks to collect the prize.
Airway Heights has not exactly been a hotbed of award-winning architecture. This likely is the first building in town honored with a national architecture award.
“I think you’re pretty safe saying that,” said City Administrator Gordon Howell. “That’s a neat honor. We need some attention out here.”
People driving through town — which is what most visitors do — may notice that the Airway Business Centre (with a “tre”) has only an auto parts store and a McDonald’s.
The windswept West Plains community of about 4,300 is located on Highway 2 between the Boeing plant and prisons to the east and Fairchild Air Force Base to the west. Its old library was a 700-square-foot concrete block building that was the laundry room for a trailer court.
The new library is at 12th and Lundstrom, near the town’s other municipal buildings. The library incorporates the feel of prairie-style design popularized decades ago in the Midwest by Frank Lloyd Wright.
“You have to look beyond the homes and other buildings nearby,” said Dailey. “It fits in with the horizontality of the West Plains.”
Dailey said his first design for the building had a curved roof, trying to capture the curve of an airplane wing, an aeronautic tribute to neighbors Fairchild and Boeing. But, after analyzing the project through “cost engineering and value engineering” with county library district director Michael J. Wirt, Dailey revised the design.
The building exterior mixes two styles of concrete block, “flipping” the materials and using small bands of the block for horizontal detail.
Some of the exterior is covered with corrugated-style metallic “zincalume” siding. “To be honest, you see a lot of that on grain silos in the Palouse,” Dailey said. Large panels of glass separate block and metal surfaces.
Laminated wood beams provide warmth and context from the exterior through the interior. The high ceiling and gallery of windows provide great natural light and a feeling the building is bigger than its dimensions. With no drop ceiling, duct work is painted dark burgundy and becomes “a sculptural item,” Dailey said.
In many aspects this building reaches well beyond Airway Heights. It’s part of a countywide system that helps provide a sense of community in each neighborhood.
Some may wonder, in an age of home computers and the Internet, why we should continue to build more brick and mortar libraries.
“Libraries are still the information centers for their communities, and they serve a role in promoting literacy, even introducing kids to reading hours,” said George Nachtsheim, whose Integrus firm has routinely been picked to design the county library buildings.
Some kind of information is best conveyed electronically, but other kinds of information are best conveyed in hard copy books and periodicals, said Wirt, noting book publishing has grown dramatically in recent years - but electronic books are not yet a substitute for hard copy.
He added: “Just as there are people who can’t afford or don’t want to buy books and magazines, there are people who can’t afford or don’t want to buy computers, Internet access and fee-based databases. The Airway Heights library, for example, has five computer workstations, two with Internet access.
“Public libraries help to level the playing field, especially for the have-nots and disenfranchised members of the community,” Wirt said.
He adds: “With the Internet, there’s no quality control, and finding information is difficult. Public libraries have a role in helping people find accurate information that meets their needs.”
That’s why the county district has used two bond issues in the past 12 years to expand its system.
“With the 1988 bond, we took care of the urban areas, and with the bond in 1996 we took care of the more rural areas,” said Wirt, who has been library district director since 1979.
That last bond issue funded new libraries in Deer Park and Airway Heights and remodeling in Cheney and Fairfield. In June, a branch opens in leased space at 57th and Regal for Moran Prairie residents.
The library floor plans are similar. The checkout desk serves as a central control and observation point. The new buildings offer community meeting rooms that can serve as polling places. “All of our branches have meeting rooms,” said Wirt. “We get new customers that way.”
The exterior designs, however, have given Dailey a chance to apply unique touches, from the Prairie-style scheme at Airway Heights to the “lodge in the woods” treatment at Deer Park.
In an information age, providing county residents with new tools in well-designed, even award-winning, buildings seems like a great civic investment.